Hsu-Ming Teo

Hsu-Ming Teo is a literary novelist and cultural historian based in the English Department at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her first novel Love and Vertigo (2000) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was shortlisted for several other awards. It has been translated into Chinese, Thai, German and Italian. Her second novel Behind the Moon (2005) was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. She is working on her third novel.

Her academic publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012), and the edited books The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020), The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (ASP 2017), and Cultural History in Australia (UNSW 2003). She has published a range of articles on the history of travel, Orientalism, imperialism, fiction, and popular culture. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and an editorial board member of the Journal of Australian Studies.

Writing Love and Vertigo

In this presentation, Hsu-Ming Teo will talk about her creative practice researching and writing her award-winning novel, focusing particularly on: characterization, narrative technique, and structure. She will then address thematic issues raised in the novel, such as romantic love, feminism, patriarchy, the stresses of immigration, Asian Australian identity, the changing meaning of multiculturalism, and the problematic issue of Orientalism and self-Orientalising gestures in the novel. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion of the reception of the novel before opening up to questions from the audience.